Putting your frying teeth into a typically Dutch lump of clay or a pile of sand on a daily basis certainly makes Combi teeth last a long time. But when it comes to rock-hard rock bottom of quarries and mining, it gets gritty very quickly. Our Swedish partner Combi Wearparts asked us to put together a blade with adapters, teeth and schrouds; for the bucket of a monstrous CAT 6018FS excavator. An earthmoving machine so big, you will never come across it - especially in the Netherlands.
Cutting a 4-metre long delta knife from 120 mm thick HARDOX HiTuf may be almost daily work at Geha Laverman. Assembling this mega 'teeth' is not, but it could well be.As Combi already foresaw what would have to be chewed in the future, 11 Pro-Claw teeth were chosen straight away. These - incidentally interchangeable - bites weigh a whopping 65 kilos each. On top of that, the adapters - the 'roots' of the tines - add another 142 kilos each.
Fortunately, Combi has graciously equipped both the tines and the adapters with lifting eyes. This makes working with 'heavy metal' of this order a lot easier and also saves your back.
Welding the adapters onto the 12-centimetre-thick HiTuf blade required a special protocol and thermo-conditioned conditions. During the welding on of the adapters, which took more than a week, the knife had to be kept at a constant temperature. This was done with specially developed heating elements.
We hope that the 165,000-kilo excavator can keep going for a while with its new 4,500-kilo teeth. At least the HARDOX HiTuf blade, Combi Pro-Claw tines and the enthusiastic commitment of Geha Laverman will not be lacking.
We would love to see the excavator with 'our' teeth back every six months for a check-up but that is out of the question, we fear. After all, the machine does its in-depth work far beyond our borders.
